King's College London

The course examines key biogeographical and ecological topics from both physical and human perspectives. This interdisciplinary approach is essential for the understanding and management of environmental problems that involve biological diversity and ecological communities. The course provides students not just with an essential grounding in the fundamentals of biogeography and ecology, but also an appreciation of how this is mediated by society. These skills are valuable for both physical and human geographers and are a central facet of environmental geography.  Most specifically, the course focuses on biodiversity, ecological systems, and ecosystem services with a focus on current threats, management, and conservation. 

The course explores how our anatomy has emerged through vertebrate evolution. The course focuses on particular body parts and use them as case studies to probe how they have been assembled during evolution. In studying these issues, students compare our anatomical organization with that of other vertebrates. This give them insights into origins of our body and how it has been modified during evolution. Students consider evidence from comparative anatomy, from fossils, and from embryology and thus gain an understanding of the transitions that occurred during evolution.

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

This is a course in policy analysis, and it helps students understand how policy is made and what impact it has. The course introduces the concept of the policy process – studying policy-making in terms of decision, implementation, and evaluation. Students seek to understand how governments function, why policy is often not implemented effectively; and how we can judge and measure policy success and failure. 

The course enables students to develop an understanding of contemporary dimensions of citizenship as a way of thinking through how these shape and are shaped by cities.  This understanding includes an awareness of the different kinds of primary, secondary, and gray sources available for the study of cities and citizenship. The course uses case studies from the global North and South to explore the political, economic, social, and cultural processes that shape cities and citizenship as connected sites of people's sense of identity and belonging.

In antiquity, the city as idea and as experience provided a central trope for Greeks and Romans to think about their place in the world, their social and political organization, the relationship between culture and nature, self and other, morality, and history. This course focuses particularly on the presence of urban everyday life in classical literature and asks students to explore ancient representations through the lenses of cultural history and current critical approaches to the city. Our starting point is to think about what is ‘natural’ to us and put it at a critical distance: the ways in which the city has featured in literature and film in modernity. Students proceed to explore the extent to which these modern representations and their cultural context find antecedents in antiquity. Students pay special attention to urban space (house/home, street, theater, baths and barbershops) as well as time and occasion (city at night, erotic city, landscapes of disaster, routine).